Heh, there's a battle for a useful use of the caps lock key. Mapping such a useful key to esc seems wasteful to me. I use vim for like everything and I use ctrl-c instead of esc. I also use the Colemak keyboard layout where caps lock is used for backspace which is a really good idea, except that con...

line-wise, but you probably don't). Or that inner block command I hadn't seen before. :h text-objects They rock :-) Or just append the movement to the command, if you're only doing one manipulation selecting is a waste of time. I do a lot of coding while others are watching and I use visual mode qu...

Nice tricks, really. But does it also work if I want to remove an asterisk from a series of lines? For example when converting a bullet list into a normal paragraph? Or if I want to keep the indentation but strip one space? Indentation commands are for.. yeah.. indentation. But block mode is useful...

:P what you call "vi used properly" is perhaps using a macro and repeating it a certain number of times? Something like qrxjq15@r? It seems faster but it really isn't, because in the time you cooked up that macro you could also just have "used vi like notepad", probably twice -- ...

ability to edit immediately, instead of having to switch in and out of edit mode If typing text means "editing" to you, why not just use nano? "edit mode" is the normal mode in vi/m. The folks at Bell Labs also took the effort to explain why mousing is faster than typing command...

it'll be a long time replacing units things like beats per minute with Hz. That would actually be pretty cool. I assume it would be used with a prefix. But what should that be? (I'm think of uses within music here) For example, people who need music with a specific tempo for a certain dance or runn...

Overwhelming force of habit isn't a reason to keep using an inferior system, it's a reason to make continued use punishable by wedgie (this goes doubly for anyone who uses the metric system in combination with units like horsepowers). So you want everyone to switch to the metric system, only they'r...

the metric inventors just made it worse by calling 1000Kg a tonne :| Yeah, I think Mg (megagram) would have been cooler. It would also teach people to mind the effin case so they don't confuse it with milligram (mg). But actually amid all the consistency, metric is still not "perfect": Th...

I don't agree with the Fahrenheit too cold/hot idea. Zero degrees Celcius makes more sense: it's the threshold where rain turns to snow (Edit: and water on the roads to ice, more importantly) which is pretty relevant for daily life. The difference between 0 and -1 in Fahrenheit is simply the differe...

I saw a talk from Google I/O I think it was where the guy said "dunder". "dunder-name-dunder". Sounds silly at first but it's actually an efficient way to communicate python verbally without introducing ambiguity.

I'll 3rd the Dell monitors. 2209WA is awesome. I have a U2711 which is also pretty awesome. The resolution (2560x1440) is very good, but I somehow feel that 27" is too small for it (when I read long texts on webpages, I usually have to enlarge the text). I think Dell U3011 with 2560x1600 would ...

Go did it Right TM : the advantages of a single, programmatically mandated format for all Go programs greatly outweigh any perceived disadvantages of the particular style No, they don't (and hence: no, it didn't). If trivial formatting details regularly constitute a sufficient obstacle that they in...

Simple SLC SSD ~400 IOPS[citation needed] 10k RPM SATA drives, queue depth 24 ~290 IOPS 10k RPM SATA drives, queue depth 1 ~130 IOPS Those are the stats I was looking at, over the IOPS page on Wikipedia, if you were curious. They may be completely off, but I find wikipedia to be at least reasonably...

Hmm.. I'm probably using terminology wrong, but I didn't consider python/duck typing strongly typed as you can use objects however you want and any type problems won't become apparent until runtime. That seems enough for a chaotic rating, but maybe less so than some other scripting languages. Yes, ...

Why's it funny? Because read/write is all harddisks do. And if you just meant "use the harddisk a lot", you'd need more criteria to decide which would be better. And if it was meant to mean something specific, it wasn't very specific. Does it mean a lot of sequential read/write? Or a lot ...

lawful characteristics = strongly typed, straightforward syntax, language follows one paradigm instead of allowing many chaotic characteristics = perl I dig your characterization of Python, but according to the above, maybe it should be lawful since it is strongly typed and has straightforward synt...

Bought myself a touchpad for my desktop and started using it with alternating hands, mostly my left. It's slower than using a mouse, but my hands don't hurt anymore! And two finger scrolling is much more enjoyable than using a mouse wheel :-) Edit: Plus, Ubuntu 11.04 should support real multitouch! ...

Sounds good. Yeah, I also think Colemak looks a lot better than Dvorak. But I'm also one of those bastards who use the control key so much that I've moved it to caps lock :) I think I'll keep caps lock as control because I guess I use it as much as backspace, plus bending the left pinky to reach for...

Necro, but the issue isn't settled :P I've been thinking about learning a new layout for a long time, and I'd rather regret doing it than not doing it! (The thing to potentially regret about doing it being decreased qwerty skills) Colemak vs Dvorak (pro Colemak) is also discussed at the Colemak site...

Sometimes a mild pain in the index finger of my right hand/mouse hand. The pain is smaller when I hold my mouse like this: IMAG0102.jpg so I do that often. Besides the mouse, I use a regular keyboard for my desktop computer which I use most of the time. The pain is less frequent when I use my netboo...

I'm happy about my Eee 1005P. It runs Ubuntu nicely, lasts 6-6.5 hrs on a charge, is sturdy, and looks stylish. If I could change one thing about it, I'd ask for dedicated home/end keys, but I guess you don't find that on many netbooks anyway

Booting would be an example of something throughput bound. I'd say that depends on the OS. Booting Windows XP sounds similar to running a random access benchmark on a harddisk, so I guess XP boot is helped a lot by fast seeks, though I don't see how it makes sense to talk about it being bound by th...

My guess is it's not about facts, it's about not losing face for a misunderstanding. Give him get something positive out of "letting you win". If he likes the actual building of the computer (as opposed to just having the computer), maybe mention that getting new hardware now, and then a n...

I've set my power management to put the monitor on standby after only two minutes of inactivity to save power. This means my screen probably goes in and out of standby 20 times per day or more. Is this bad for its life expectancy?

VIM code folds just fine, thanks. vim also takes about 3 seconds to start on my 400MHz linux machine. and once it's started, if you press the down arrow, it takes about two seconds for the cursor to actually move down. Which just shows how irrelevant it is to refer to a computer by clock frequency.

I just got an Eee 1005P, so now I can join in on the netbook talk :) writing On mine, the keyboard (91% of full size) is not comfortable for extended periods of writing. And the lack of dedicated home/end/pgup/pgdn keys is driving me completely nuts, but ymmv. economic single-core CPU (to reduce hea...

When you're typing, you're doing it at the very left of your deskspace (if you're right-handed), which is just dumb Much agreeage. With this keyboard, you can put the numpad on the left side: http://www.techfuels.com/attachments/everything-else/4053d1216822083-logitech-dinovo-desktop-laser-keyboard...